Health Worker Influenza Vaccination Programs: A Key to Pandemic Preparedness and Effective COVID-19 Vaccine Deployment in Low- and Middle-Income Countries.

ABSTRACT:

Background/objectives

The COVID-19 pandemic presented an urgent global need to quickly vaccinate health workers (HWs). We used this unique circumstance to assess whether mature influenza vaccination programs for HWs facilitated rapid deployment of COVID-19 vaccines in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

Methods

We used publicly available population-level COVID-19 vaccination coverage data from the World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 PowerBI Dashboard for 60 LMICs to investigate general population coverage with the COVID-19 vaccine over the first year of vaccine rollout. We also evaluated country-level policy and program data reported to the WHO-United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) electronic Joint Reporting Form (eJRF) in 2022 or earlier to determine if the pre

SUBMITTER: McCarron M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12945195 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature